Handling Social Media Complaints – A Review Of Current Best Practices

Often billed as “the new frontier of customer services”, social media is an increasingly popular channel for product and service complaints. 

Research published by Sprout Social suggests that 47% - 69% of consumers now head straight to Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram or Threads when they want to voice a complaint. This research is slanted in favour of retail brands, but advocacy groups like Consumer Reports are beginning to coach consumers on the best way to leverage social media when complaining about financial services, energy or housing providers so it seems reasonable to assume that the trend will continue apace – and extend to all verticals.  

The growing popularity of social media complaints represents a significant challenge for organisations that aren’t equipped to handle them properly, and a huge opportunity for customer service teams who do have the training, experience and tools needed to handle them in-line with current best practices. 

To be clear, those best practices boil down to: 

• Minimising response times 
• Capturing every detail 
• Replying using the right tone and language
• Moving complaints offline as soon as you possibly can, using a dedicated complaints management solution that enables you to provide consistent and compliant service

But there’s a lot of nuance to the timing, the language used and the way complaints are escalated. When cases do get serious, frontline teams need to be able to collate evidence, involve the right people and, ultimately, demonstrate good complaint handling which is why we’ve pulled together this in-depth guide to the specifics of social media complaint handling.

Drawing on expert advice published by trade associations and ombudsman, consultancies like McKinsey and research bodies like the International Association for the Development of the Information Society (IADAS) we’ve set out to provide a comprehensive  playbook that you can use to upgrade or fine-tune your social media complaints handling process 

Now, it's worth noting that we’re software specialists – not complaint handling experts. We don’t pretend to have hands-on experience with social media complaint handling, and recognise that our understanding is predominantly theoretical. 

However, we also recognise that the lack of straightforward and actionable advice on social media complaints handling is a real problem for businesses across the UK. 

We’re also confident that the 10+ years we’ve spent developing a dedicated complaints management tool – in lockstep with complaints teams operating  in a variety of sectors - gives us a good handle on the needs of a modern social media complaint handling process.

Enough about us though: Let’s start looking at the intricacies of social media complaint handling.  

What makes social media complaints different?

First things first, it’s important to recognise that social media complaints are public. Traditional - in-person or written - complaints play out behind closed doors (or in the relative privacy of your department’s inbox). But the content of a social media complaint, and the way that you respond to that content, will be plainly visible to the public at large.

Brand advocates, current customers and prospective customers will all have a front-row seat to the proceedings – and immediate insight into:

• The nature of complaints
• The time it takes you to respond to that complaint
• The way that you or your front-line operatives respond to that complaint
• The resolution (if any) or follow up to a complaint

This can be a blessing or a curse. Mishandle social media complaints and your consumer base may be left with the impression that you don’t really want to engage with problems, hear from your customer base, or accept blame for service or product issues. You’ll take a reputational hit, and put off potential customers that will inevitably end up flocking to your competition. 

But if you get things right, studies suggest that you can significantly increase brand loyalty and customer retention. According to Business Fulcrum, brands that answer social media complaints well tend to see a 25% increase in customer advocacy.

And further research published by McKinsey suggests that brands doing well on social media channels also experience 15% less churn than their competitors (churn is a measure of the loss of customers or the loss of revenue over a given period, usually one year). 

There’s even some suggestion that responsive and helpful social media complaint management can prime customers to spend more with B2C or D2C brands, with studies showing a 20-40% increase in spend when customers feel that their social media complaints are addressed promptly and resolved properly.

Speaking of which, let’s take a look at what current best practice tell us about handling social media complaints:

1. Minimise Response Times

Some complaints departments still operate on the assumption that they have 24 hours to respond to a complaint, and several days to resolve it. Unfortunately, the landscape has changed. 

According to McKinsey’s “Social media as a service differentiator: How to win”, you actually have approximately 15 - 60 minutes to acknowledge a social media complaint, and 24-48 hours to resolve it. This timeframe stretches to 5 - 7 days if the complaint is complex and needs to be passed to a different department, but the emphasis is on speed here: Customers leveraging social media to make a complaint expect a rapid response. 

Now, we’ll be the first to acknowledge that these timescales are radically different from the timescales laid out by regulators, and there’s no legal need to meet them. But it’s important to note that there are pretty serious consequences to dropping the ball here. 

In 2023, A study published by PwC revealed that 32% of consumers would stop engaging with a brand if they had a bad experience with their customer service. This joins a growing body of research that highlights the importance of meeting customer expectations and while response times aren’t everything, they’re certainly a significant factor. 

To ensure you meet the tight time limits imposed by customer expectations, it’s vital that you have proper workflows and processes in place. You need to be alerted every time someone ‘@’s’ your company or brand, you need staff who are primed to respond quickly, and you need to ensure that complaints are quickly divided up among available staff members so that nothing falls through the cracks. 

If you want to go the extra mile, you could also consider actively monitoring social media channels for rogue complaints that don’t use your company’s handle. 

You don’t need dedicated complaints management software to do this – social media management solutions like Sprout Social will do the trick, but it’s worth remembering that you will need dedicated complaints management software to help you move more serious cases offline, and to manage the finer details of cases that will involve lawyers or legal proceedings. Speaking of which…

2. Move things offline as quickly as possible 

It’s imperative that you’re seen to acknowledge a social media complaint: studies show that social media users are incredibly wary of anything that looks like censorship or neglect, and publicly apologising for a bad experience really is key to improving brand perception on channels like X, Facebook or Linkedin. 

But you don’t necessarily need to let the wider public see the ins and outs of your resolution process, the fine-detail of a customer complaint, or the often messy business of finding a mutually satisfactory way to resolve an issue. 

To that end, experts often advise that you move complaints to a more private forum as soon as you possibly can – normally by offering a phone number or personalised email address that customers can use to continue the resolution process (Hallam).

Now, it’s worth noting that the way in which you attempt to move these conversations into a more controlled space does have a tremendous impact on the eventual outcome. A great many social media experts warn that if your response sounds too automated or robotic, it can cause problems.

Some organisations try to get around this by implementing a three-response rule, where they try to engage in a little well-meaning but ultimately harmless back and forth with a customer before offering an alternative path to resolution. Normally this is achieved by asking for details, asking a follow up question, and then making the offer (ABTA).

Others simply opt for a friendly and direct tone; acknowledging complaints, apologising for the experience and asking customers to reach out to a specific email address.

The best route for your organisation will depend on how much detail you want to expose, and your appetite for risk. Experimentation will probably be key. But ultimately, what you really want to do is set out a process and make sure that everyone in your team sticks to it because consistency really is key.

If you’re using dedicated complaints management software to manage serious complaints that are likely to require escalation, it’s worth thinking about implementing a specific social media workflow that prompts team members to try and move conversations offline after a certain number of messages.

This is something that we were very keen to accommodate with our own case management software, because it’s very clear that extended exchanges on social media can go sour quite quickly.

It’s also key to shielding team members from attempts to bully or extort via the complaints processes. There’s a lot of pressure on complaints management staff, especially when they’re operating on social media and feel that they’re directly responsible for upholding your brand’s reputation.

If you don’t have dedicated complaints management software and are instead relying on more generic social media management tools to keep on top of your social media complaints,training is the next best thing. You want everyone on your team to understand the protocol and stick to the timings so that you offer a consistent experience to complaining customers, and look polished while operating in a very public space.  

3. Capture everything

Social media is an inherently transitory space. Customers can delete tweets, threads or posts in the blink of an eye, and there’s often no reliable way to recover the exact wording - or specific details - of a complaint. 

This is problematic if, say, three weeks down the line a member of your team has to go back to an unhappy customer to clarify some of the details of their complaint, actions a replacement for the wrong product, or otherwise confuses your attempted resolution in a way that alienates or irritates your customer (Which?).

It’s also important to recognise that while most complaints are made in good faith, some customers will make spurious complaints and then, when pressed, try to alter the details of their initial report. 

If they’re complaining via a social media channel and take it upon themselves to edit or delete their initial complaint, it can be difficult to prove that they’ve tried to change their story. 

To prevent both issues, it’s imperative that you find a way to capture and record all communications made via social media. 

Assuming that you’re not using dedicated complaints management software, this can be done by taking a screenshot of the initial complaint and your response, and storing these screenshots in a clearly-labelled file on your computer. But this can cause problems if cases are shared between team members or other teams within the organisation need to access information contained in those initial communications.

That’s why groups like isoTracker, who make cloud-based quality assurance software, strongly recommend that complaints or customer satisfaction departments invest in a central repository of some kind (isoTracker). 

To be clear, that’s normally a cloud-based or locally-hosted complaints management software that can be used to store and manage data on a per-complaint basis, so that everyone in your organisation has access to a file that contains details of a complaint, and any relevant forms, screen captures, letters or images relevant to the case. 

Workpro Complaints is our solution. It aims to create a centralised hub that can be used to track and record complaints alongside all necessary supporting documentation, including evidence of conversations, receipts, pictures of damage etc. But it’d be disingenuous to pretend that ours was the only solution and it’s worth noting that you can find plenty of competing products that will support basic evidence gathering initiatives. 

4. Keep the tone of your replies even and consistent

In our blog post on handling email marketing complaints, we talked about the difficulty of interpreting the tone of written communications. This problem is only exacerbated on social media, where lots of different people will have the opportunity to infer or interpret your words according to their own biases. 

As such, it’s incredibly important to ensure that all team members are primed to respond to social media complaints graciously, using calm and direct language that can’t be misinterpreted. 

Forbes recommends that you start by addressing unhappy customers by name. Social media is, as the name suggests, a nominally social space and it helps to treat customers like real people (Forbes).

You are then advised to thank the customer for reaching out, acknowledge the complaint and apologise using positive and constructive language. Express genuine desire to fix the problem. 

But stop there, and always avoid trying to offer explanations, justifications or rationalisations of any kind. In almost every case, the intricacies of a complaint can be dealt with offline and any attempt to work through a complaint ‘live’ on social media opens you up to accusations of trying to deflect or minimise complaints.

Ultimately, it’s about being clear, direct and calm. You want the customer and any third parties tuning into the conversation to see your team doing their best to help. Anything beyond that is too prone to misinterpretation to be worth your while. 

If you’re worried about getting the tone right, pre-written social media complaints templates can be very helpful, although it’s generally best to give staff some space to personalise and tailor responses – otherwise they’ll be accused of sounding robotic and disingenuous. 

ICMI has a great guide to writing flexible social media response templates, covering everything from personalisation to the proper use of emojis, which you can view here.

It’s also worth reviewing social media complaints with your team on a semi-regular basis, so that you can check the consistency of your responses and ensure that they’re on brand.

If you’d like to bring consistency into your social media complaints strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, we’re not complaints or customer service experts. But we do make complaints management software that’s used by some of the UK’s biggest brands, including the British Heart Foundation, the Housing Ombudsman and the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. 

More to the point, our complaints management software gives you everything you need to create custom workflows and templates for social media complaints, and our team will always be happy to sit down and work out how to ensure that you have the support you need to handle complaints properly.